GraphQLConf 2026: Full Schedule

May 19 - 20 | In-Person Only
GraphQLConf 2026 website

The Sched app allows you to build your schedule but you must also be registered for GraphQLConf 2026 to participate in the sessions.

Please note: This schedule is automatically displayed in Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7). To see the schedule in your preferred timezone, please select from the drop-down located at the bottom of the menu to the right.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Timing of sessions and room locations are subject to change.

9:05am PDT

Keynote: GraphQL Foundation Update - Lee Byron, Co-Creator of GraphQL and Director, GraphQL Foundation

Tuesday May 19, 2026 9:05am - 9:15am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Speakers

Lee Byron

Co-creator of GraphQL and Director, GraphQL Foundation

Foundation Update, Lee Byron GraphQLConf pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 9:05am - 9:15am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Keynote Sessions

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

9:15am PDT

Sponsored Keynote: Shaping New GraphQL Patterns from Strong Baselines - Uri Goldshtein, CEO, The Guild

Tuesday May 19, 2026 9:15am - 9:20am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Speakers

Uri Goldshtein

CEO, The Guild

Shaping New GraphQL Patterns from Strong Baselines, Uri Goldshtein GraphQLConf 2026 pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 9:15am - 9:20am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Keynote Sessions

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

9:50am PDT

Keynote: Creating a Golden Path for GraphQL - Benjie Gillam, Maintainer, Graphile & Kewei Qu, Software Engineer, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 9:50am - 10:00am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

GraphQL's precise specification gives us incredible interoperability and a rich ecosystem of tooling to be used with any compliant GraphQL service... And yet, that hasn't led to every adopter of GraphQL having a great experience. Some leave disillusioned with performance pitfalls, security concerns, and unforeseen complexity. This can be frustrating for successful GraphQL practitioners since in many cases the solutions to these problems have existed for most of the last decade.

The Golden Path Initiative aims to make it so avoiding common pitfalls becomes the path of least resistance. By encouraging off-the-shelf GraphQL-related software to implement the recommended default behaviours, we hope that GraphQL adopters will have the greatest chance of being successful even without ingesting the vast amount of information in the ecosystem. The Golden Path is not centred on building the most optimal experience, instead it is focused on minimizing downsides: making it so users are exploring around the "pit of success", and taking them far from the "pit of despair".

But to do this will take a huge, coordinated community effort! We need successful GraphQL practitioners; maintainers of key GraphQL libraries, frameworks and tooling; and documentation writers to join us over the next 6 months as we lay out the Golden Path, its recommendations and requirements; and then next year: time to start implementing it across the ecosystem!

Speakers

Benjie Gillam

Maintainer, Graphile

A self-described "community-funded open source maintainer," Benjie dedicates much of his time to open source, made possible by the support of appreciative and forward-thinking individuals and organizations. He can often be found helping contributors advance their proposals, and has... Read More →

Kewei Qu

Software Engineer, Meta Platforms

TBD

Creating a Golden Path for GraphQL.pptx (1) pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 9:50am - 10:00am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Keynote Sessions

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:00am PDT

Keynote: GraphQL in the AI Era - Matt DeBergalis, CEO and Co-Founder, Apollo GraphQL

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:00am - 10:05am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

A year ago, we forecast an important role for GraphQL in an AI future. That prediction has come true, with GraphQL now serving as the foundation of critical AI initiatives at household brands in retail, hospitality, health care and many more. Just as importantly, GraphQL's declarative entity-based architecture has proven to be an ideal match for modern agentic development.

In this talk, we'll share a view of where GraphQL now sits in the modern enterprise stack, recount lessons we've learned putting MCP workloads and agentic software in production with the graph, our roadmap for an AI-first world, and a vision of where GraphQL can and must go next.

Speakers

Matt DeBergalis

CEO and co-founder, Apollo GraphQL

GraphQL 2026 Apollo Matt DeBergalis pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:00am - 10:05am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Keynote Sessions

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:30am PDT

Safely Merging Subgraphs in a Distributed World - Clarice Abreu & Rodrigo Jesus, Brex

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am PDT

Grand Ballroom I

In the rush to "break the monolith" through GraphQL Federation, organizations can go too far and end up with an explosion of subgraphs. At scale, this can lead to a different kind of pain: high operational overhead, reliability issues, and ultimately, a degraded graph quality. This session explores how to pivot from "splitting" to "merging" without impacting the customer.
The presentation will dive into the workflow developed by Brex to consolidate federated subgraphs safely and reliably, covering:
•⁠ ⁠The Why: Identifying the tipping point where service fragmentation hurts more than it helps.
•⁠ ⁠The Strategy: A zero-downtime workflow for merging services covering code migration, schema composition and traffic shifting
•⁠ ⁠Reliability: How to ensure schema integrity and 0 customer impact during the transition.
•⁠ ⁠Outcomes: How the consolidation improved our graph design and simplified our overall architecture.

Attendees will leave with a framework for evaluating when federation boundaries are hurting more than helping and a roadmap for executing a "subgraph smash" in their own federated infrastructure.

Speakers

Clarice Abreu

Senior Software Engineer, Brex

Clarice Abreu leads the roadmap and strategy for the Brex's GraphQL platform. She drives initiatives to improve schema quality, schema validation and observability, helping teams build and evolve a large-scale federated GraphQL architecture.

Rodrigo Jesus

Senior Software Engineer, Brex

Rodrigo Jesus is a Senior Software Engineer at Brex's Application Infrastructure team focused on taming complexity in large distributed systems. He currently leads service smashing and domain consolidation efforts that reduce fragmentation, lower operational overhead, and improve... Read More →

Safely Merging Subgraphs in a Distributed World pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Federation + Distributed Systems

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:30am PDT

Sponsored Session: Federation, Reversed: A Consumer-First Future with Fission - David Stutt, Wundergraph

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

GraphQL Federation traditionally takes a bottom-up approach: individual service schemas are defined first, and the final federated API emerges from the federation algorithm. However, GraphQL's strength is enabling APIs that are designed around what consumers actually need. A bottom-up model can make it harder to intentionally design the federated API surface. In this talk we introduce Fission, a new federation algorithm that enables a consumer-first, design-driven approach to federated GraphQL APIs. We'll show how Fission lets teams start with API design and derive the services therefrom—flipping the traditional federation paradigm on its head. And best yet: we'll explain using cake.

Speakers

David Stutt

Senior Founding Software Engineer, Wundergraph

David is one of the four founding engineers at WunderGraph who collectively built the software foundations of the company. David's career began in the finance sector of software engineering before moving exclusively to API management in 2022. From that point, David started his deep-dive... Read More →

FederationReversed pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Federation + Distributed Systems

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:30am PDT

React Server Components Vs. GraphQL - Jordan Eldredge, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am PDT

Boardroom

React Server Components (RSC) and GraphQL have considerable overlap in the problems they seek to solve. This makes them competitors in some scenarios.

In this talk we’ll recount the origins of RSCs at Meta as a prototype within the Relay GraphQL client, discuss how to choose between the two technologies, and end with an exploration of architectures in which they both might reasonably coexist moving forward.

Speakers

Jordan Eldredge

Software Engieer, Meta

Jordan has spent the last nine years working at Meta. He currently works on Relay, a sophisticated GraphQL client for JavaScript that powers most of Meta's JavaScript applications.

GraphQL vs. RSC Jordan Eldredge pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am PDT
Boardroom

Servers

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

11:05am PDT

Lightning Talk: The 40,000-field Query: Optimizations for Gigantic High-QPS Operations - Gary Zeng, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:05am - 11:15am PDT

Grand Ballroom I

Parsing a GraphQL query generally has negligible cost. But what happens your front page query has millions of QPS, 10s of thousands of fields, and there are hundreds of versions of the query? At Meta, we've found that parsing becomes a significant bottle neck under these constraints.

In this talk, we dive into server-side optimizations we built to handle persisted documents beyond simple LRU caches. We will cover:
- Lazy fragment parsing. We delay parsing a fragment until the executor encounters a spread that matches the fragment's type, using offset maps to jump through the document text.
- Traffic based caching. We cache pre-parsed structures taking into consideration CPU savings and memory cost.
- Fragment inlining to reduce overhead in the CollectFields step.

Attendees leave with deep understanding of performance considerations of GraphQL execution engines. I hope other GraphQL server implementations can consider adopting similar strategies to better serve a larger variety of traffic patterns.

Speakers

Gary Zeng

Software Engineer, GraphQL Platform, Meta

Gary is a Software Engineer working on Meta's GraphQL engine powering one of the worlds largest schemas. He focuses the balance between language design and system reliability. In the physical world, Gary has hosted over 1000 hours of Dungeons and Dragons.

GraphQL Conf Gary Zeng pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:05am - 11:15am PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Production Insights - Huge Scale

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

11:40am PDT

From Query to Conversation: GraphQL as an AI Interface Layer - Hugh Nguyen & Adam Conrad, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:40am - 12:05pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

How do you teach AI to navigate GraphQL schemas with thousands of fields? At Meta, we built an AI system that dynamically discovers and loads subschemas on-demand, enabling natural language interactions with complex enterprise APIs.

This talk shares hard-won lessons from building production AI that performs real-time schema exploration, manages dynamic subschema composition, and generates sophisticated GraphQL operations at Meta's scale.

Key Topics:
- Dynamic schema discovery from user intent
- On-demand subschema loading architecture (@require_graphql_subschemas directive)
- Teaching LLMs GraphQL type relationships and dependencies
- Performance optimizations for real-time schema introspection
- What failed and why certain approaches don't scale

Lessons from Production:
- Schema design principles that work better with AI
Security considerations for AI-driven schema access
- Operational challenges and monitoring strategies
- Attendees leave with battle-tested patterns for conversational GraphQL systems, specific techniques for dynamic schema loading, and honest insights about what didn't work along the way.

Speakers

Hugh Nguyen

Software Engineer, Meta

Hugh Nguyen is a Software Engineer working on Metamate team at Meta, which builds AI powered products and platforms. Hugh is working on enabling AI agents to access all internal knowledge through GraphQL, a novel approach to rapidly expand AI agent's capabilities.

Adam Conrad

Engineering Manager, Meta

Engineering Manager for integrating GraphQL in our mobile applications at Meta. Previously focused on React at Meta.

Slides PDF (1) pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:40am - 12:05pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

11:40am PDT

The State of GraphQL Agent Skills - Dale Seo, Apollo GraphQL

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:40am - 12:05pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

AI coding agents are now a daily reality for GraphQL developers, yet there's a persistent gap between what agents can do and what they actually know. Without guidance, they generate anonymous queries, skip variables, rely on deprecated patterns, and miss conventions experienced teams consider obvious. Every conversation starts from zero. Agent Skills are an emerging answer: a lightweight, open format for encoding expertise that agents can automatically apply. In a short time, the community has begun building Skills that teach everything from schema usage to client caching, and the ecosystem is evolving fast. This talk surveys the current state of GraphQL Agent Skills: what they are, how they're authored, how they plug into AI tools and workflows, and how they complement MCP. As the creator and maintainer of Apollo Skills, I'll share what we've learned building and shipping them. Through real-world examples, we'll see how Skills help agents design a schema safely, write the right operations, and recover from mistakes. We'll examine design trade-offs, emerging patterns, and open challenges still ahead. You'll leave knowing how to make your graph work better with AI agents.

Speakers

Dale Seo

Software Engineer, Apollo GraphQL

Helping developers help the world 🧑‍🚀🚀

The State of GraphQL Agent Skills pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:40am - 12:05pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Beginer
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

11:40am PDT

Shopify's Breadth-First Bet: Rethinking GraphQL Execution - Greg MacWilliam, Shopify

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:40am - 12:05pm PDT

Boardroom

Pretty much every major GraphQL execution implementation follows the same pattern: depth-first traversal. But the spec doesn’t require this. At Shopify, we challenged that status quo and rewrote GraphQL execution to run breadth-first.

Here’s how it works: instead of running a field resolver repeatedly across each object in a list during its depth pass, we execute each field resolver only once per selection with a complete breadth of objects spanning the response. The napkin math is compelling—5 fields resolved across a list of 100 objects running depth-first will produce 500 resolver calls + lazy promises, while running breadth-first will only produce 5. We’ve seen dramatic results with some large list queries shaving many seconds off their end-to-end response times.

This talk will cover:

* Why depth-first has hidden costs that scale linearly.
* How breadth-first inverts the cost model.
* Why dataloaders are a hack.
* The trade-offs we accepted.
* How we're incrementally migrating to breadth execution.

If you've ever been concerned that CPU-bound GraphQL performance doesn't scale well, this talk offers a new perspective—and proof that challenging conventions can pay off.

Speakers

Greg MacWilliam

Staff Software Engineer, Shopify

Greg is an API Foundations engineer at Shopify focused on GraphQL scalability and performance. He’s an open-source contributor on several GraphQL projects, and author of The Schema Stitching Handbook. Coder. Dad. Likes dogs, juggles fire.

breadth first execution pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 11:40am - 12:05pm PDT
Boardroom

Performance

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

12:15pm PDT

An Alternative To JSON Responses: Argo in WhatsApp - Kevin Gorham, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 12:15pm - 12:40pm PDT

Boardroom

Optimizing wire size is in WhatsApp's DNA. In the early days, we transformed verbose XML into a compact binary protocol (WAP) that helped us serve users worldwide on constrained networks. Now, as we migrate to GraphQL, we faced a new challenge: JSON responses were 30% larger than WAP-encoded equivalents. This talk tells the story of how we solved that problem—by leveraging GraphQL's type system to outperform not just JSON, but WAP and protobufs too. We'll share the technical approach (implementing Argo), the results (27-50% smaller responses), and why this represents the next evolution in efficient data transfer for Meta's apps.

Speakers

Kevin Gorham

Software Engineer, Meta

Shepherding client-side GraphQL at WhatsApp.

GraphQLConf 2026 — Argo in WhatsApp v4 pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 12:15pm - 12:40pm PDT
Boardroom

Performance

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

12:15pm PDT

The Internal Lens: GraphQL Gateways From a Different Axis - Angel Svirkov, trivago

Tuesday May 19, 2026 12:15pm - 12:40pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

GraphQL is often framed around multiple clients, external consumers, and solving over/under-fetching. But what if you have one client, fragmented internal APIs, and colleagues as your consumers? This talk explores that different axis—and why GraphQL still matters.

At trivago, we built a second GraphQL Gateway to unify internal services. What started as admin tooling became something more: a lens that surfaced hidden system relationships, a catalyst for cross-team collaboration, and now a foundation for AI-assisted tooling enriched with human-written business context.

This session shares honest lessons from six years of running an internal-facing gateway. You'll hear how we unified services without imposing upstream requirements, fostered collaboration across previously siloed teams, and designed audit logging around user intent—not just technical calls. Whether or not this specific approach fits your context, you'll leave with a broader perspective: there's more to GraphQL than its typical framing suggests.

Speakers

Angel Svirkov

Software Engineer, trivago

Angel Svirkov is a Software Engineer at trivago, Germany. Over 10 years, he has bridged product needs and engineering realities—owning problems end-to-end from discovery through architecture, implementation, rollout, and operations. For the past six years, this work has centered... Read More →

The Internal Lens pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 12:15pm - 12:40pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Production Insights - Regular Scale

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

2:10pm PDT

Lightning Talk: Schema Composition Without Federation - Matt Mahoney, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:10pm - 2:20pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

In a world where context is limited, what do we need from GraphQL to build composable, type safe products?

Speakers

Matt Mahoney

Software Engineer, Meta

I work on Meta's Mobile GraphQL team.

Schema Composition Without Federation pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:10pm - 2:20pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Clients

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

2:10pm PDT

Lower Latency With Streaming GraphQL - Rob Richard, 1stDibs

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:10pm - 2:35pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Learn how to lower latency in your applications by streaming your GraphQL responses using the @defer and @stream directives. Learn the trade-offs of when to use these new directives and how they differ from GraphQL Subscriptions.

@defer and @stream have been in development for some time now and have gone through many iterations. Learn about the motivation behind these changes and how they will lead to scalable GraphQL servers and efficient clients.

Speakers

Rob Richard

Senior Director, Front-End Engineering, 1stDibs

Rob is a front-end engineer at 1stDibs, an online marketplace for extraordinary design. He is also a member of the GraphQL Technical Steering committee, where he has been championing the @defer & @stream spec proposal.

Defer and Stream GraphQL Conf 2026 pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:10pm - 2:35pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Performance

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

2:45pm PDT

Lightning Talk: Resolvers Everywhere: Rethinking Client and Server Boundaries in GraphQL - Janette Cheng, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:45pm - 2:55pm PDT

Boardroom

In GraphQL, a resolver is defined as “the internal function for determining the resolved value of a field.” Traditionally, resolvers live exclusively on the server—but should they? Many teams find themselves either duplicating business logic on the client or pushing client-specific concerns into backend code when trying to treat server models as view models.

This talk explores an alternative: client-side resolvers. With Relay Resolvers, clients can define fields that combine and transform data locally. We'll walk through how they work and guidance for deciding when logic belongs on the server versus the client.

Speakers

Janette Cheng

Software Engineer, Meta

Working on the GraphQL client and build infrastructure for mobile apps at Meta

resolvers everywhere pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 2:45pm - 2:55pm PDT
Boardroom

Clients

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

3:20pm PDT

The Invisible Fortress: Embedding Zero-Trust Governance in the Supergraph - Gaurav Singh & Sulbigar Shanawaz, Capital One

Tuesday May 19, 2026 3:20pm - 3:45pm PDT

Boardroom

In high-stakes industries, a GraphQL schema is more than a technical contract—it is a live map of your enterprise’s risk surface. For security teams, schema modifications are often "black box" events that threaten data integrity. To scale safely, we must move beyond manual gatekeeping to a Zero-Trust Supergraph where security is an invisible, automated fortress.

We will present a framework for Embedded Governance to bridge engineering and enterprise risk. Learn how to transform your graph's technical "menu" into a transparent Data Marketplace with radical observability, ensuring built-in security and compliance.

Attendees will learn to:
- Navigate the Risk Primer: Translate GraphQL features (types, fields, directives) into risk language to build organizational trust.
- Shift Security Left: Automate security with secure frameworks & replacing manual reviews.
- Architect for Data Isolation: Use of fine grained access to manage entitlements and prevent unauthorized data exposure.
- Harden the Control Plane: Reduce attack surface using technical strategies like disabling introspection and enforcing persisted query ownership.

Speakers

Gaurav Singh

Distinguished Engineer, Capital One

Gaurav Singh serves as a Distinguished Engineer and Cybersecurity Architect at Capital One. His contributions were pivotal in the enablement of GraphQL Federation throughout the enterprise, which involved the introduction of open-source GraphQL federation products , a dedicated GraphQL... Read More →

Sulbigar Shanawaz

Distinguished Engineer, Capital One

Sulbigar Shanawaz is a Distinguished Engineer at Capital One, where he leads architectural strategy for the Enterprise Entitlements platform. He specializes in centralizing customer data security by engineering robust validation frameworks for regulatory, compliance, and audit requirements across hig... Read More →

The Invisible Fortress GraphQLConf 2026 External Copy.pptx pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 3:20pm - 3:45pm PDT
Boardroom

Security

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

4:05pm PDT

The Case Against __typename - Sabrina Wasserman, Meta Platforms Inc.

Tuesday May 19, 2026 4:05pm - 4:30pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

The GraphQL Schema Documentation (https://graphql.org/learn/schema/) defines the __typename field as “a special meta-field that automatically exists on every Object type and resolves to the name of that type, providing a way to differentiate between data types on the client.” At Meta, we’ve learned that relying on __typename to delineate type on the client can actually be a foot-gun. Querying __typename for every object is clunky, increases payload size, creates backward compatibility issues for older, unupgradable clients, and isn’t sufficient for handling complex schema cases like nested abstract types.

In this talk, I’ll walk through specific scenarios where __typename falls short, and demonstrate how using a new metadata field, `is_fulfilled`, is better-suited to writing more robust GraphQL clients.

Speakers

Sabrina Wasserman

Software Engineer, Meta Platforms Inc.

GraphQL client-side frameworks software engineer at Meta.

V2 The Case Against typename pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 4:05pm - 4:30pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Clients

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

4:40pm PDT

Shifting Instagram Development Towards Monolith Server Via Federated Schema - Xiao Han, Chi Chan, Deepak Singh, Kristina Kamendova & Anirudh Padmarao, Meta

Tuesday May 19, 2026 4:40pm - 5:05pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Instagram is moving from a Python monolith to a PHP monolith. Come find out how we leverage GraphQL to define a single API across both monoliths to power major product migrations (e.g. Stories, Reels, Threads) and facilitate incremental development shifts.

Meta’s architectural philosophy favors federation to support a monolithic architecture over traditional microservices.

Speakers

Kristina Kamendova

Software Engineer, Meta

Software Engineer at Instagram Monetization Platform

Deepak Singh

Software Engineer, Meta

Anirudh Padmarao

Software Engineer, Meta

I work on server infrastructure at Instagram.

Xiao Han

Software Engineer, Meta Platform Inc.

Software Engineer on Instagram Product Foundations

Chi Chan

Software Engineer, Meta

GraphQL server side framework at Meta.

GraphQL Conf 2026 Shifting Instagram Development Towards Monolith Server Via Federated Schema pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 4:40pm - 5:05pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Federation + Distributed Systems

Audience Level Advanced
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

4:40pm PDT

Inverse Conway Maneuver, with GraphQL - Sam Deng, Zillow Group

Tuesday May 19, 2026 4:40pm - 5:05pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

Left to its own devices, software companies ship its own team structure (Conway’s Law). Scale leads to data silos, unclear ownership, and an incoherent GraphQL schema. Zillow pushes back against this natural entropy.
Organizing data post hoc is untenable — trying to keep up with the legions of changing SaaS systems is a losing battle. The schema must be organized at the data producer end. This is the story of Zillow’s journey to bring order to a chaotic GraphQL schema. Starting with its most critical data domains, listings and customers, Zillow has built a canonical data schema in its federated graph, that aligns its multiple business units and streamlines data sharing.

Speakers

Sam Deng

Senior Principal Engineer, Zillow Group

Senior Principal SDE at Zillow Group by day, avid user by night. Sam Deng is catalyst for foundational platforms that power the Zillow Super App. He is a purveyor of dad jokes, software architect, former runner, and occasional AI-empowered code slinger.

Inverse Conway Maneuver with GraphQL pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 4:40pm - 5:05pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Schema Design + Evolution + Governance

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

5:15pm PDT

Understanding Your Graph, One Hash at a Time - Jens Neuse, WunderGraph

Tuesday May 19, 2026 5:15pm - 5:40pm PDT

Boardroom

Have you ever wished you could better understand how the entities in your graph behave over time? Are they cacheable? How often are they updated? How often are they accessed? What is the distribution of keys?

The primitives of GraphQL federation are simple: Entities with keys to uniquely identify them, distributed across multiple services.

The story they tell? It's a fascinating one, but nobody talks about it. Until now.
And it's not even that complicated, just a couple of hashes and we're able to learn more about your data than you ever thought possible.

Speakers

Jens Neuse

Jens Neuse (CEO WunderGraph), WunderGraph

Jens is a father to 3 kids, tries to be a good husband, is the author and a maintainer of graphql-go-tools for more than 6 years, and the CEO and Co-Founder of WunderGraph, a company that offers Cosmo, an open source GraphQL Federation platform.

Understanding Your Graph, One Hash at a Time — GraphQL Conf 2026 pdf

Tuesday May 19, 2026 5:15pm - 5:40pm PDT
Boardroom

Observability + Telemetry + Tracing

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:15am PDT

Lightning Talk: GraphQLShield: CWE-Aware Defense in Depth for GraphQL APIs in Go - Ravi Sastry Kadali, Open Source Contributor

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:15am - 10:25am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

GraphQL APIs face a unique threat landscape: deeply nested queries cause resource exhaustion, introspection exposes entire schemas, and mutation variables carry injection payloads past traditional WAFs. Yet most Go-based GraphQL servers ship with zero security middleware between HTTP and resolver execution.

I introduce GraphQLShield, an open-source Go middleware bringing defense-in-depth to GraphQL APIs through three layers: (1) Static schema analysis detecting cyclic types, missing depth limits, and sensitive field exposure before deployment; (2) Runtime CWE-aware input sanitization catching SQL injection, XSS, command injection, path traversal, and NoSQL injection in GraphQL variables — bridging go-safeinput’s MITRE CWE Top 25 coverage to GraphQL; and (3) Resolver code auditing inspired by gosec and cryptoguard-go flagging insecure crypto, hardcoded secrets, and missing auth checks.

A quick demo shows GraphQLShield intercepting 7 attack vectors against a gqlgen API, from SQL injection in mutation variables to depth-based DoS, while legitimate requests pass cleanly. Attendees leave with a zero-dependency Go library covering 14 CWE vulnerability classes across static and runtime analysis.

Speakers

Ravi Sastry Kadali

Go Ecosystem Contributor & Security Engineer, Open Source Contributor

Ravi Sastry Kadali is a security and systems engineer with over 20 years of experience building production infrastructure across defense, enterprise, and hyperscale consumer platforms — with Go as his tool of choice. He is a contributor to the Go project itself (golang/go), with... Read More →

graphqlshield RaviSastryKadali GraphQLConf 2026 pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:15am - 10:25am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Security

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:15am PDT

When GraphQL Gets Expensive: Performance & Cost Patterns in Production Serverless Architectures - Harpreet Siddhu, AWS Community Builder & Shravanth Gowda Venkatesh, Independent Researcher

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:15am - 10:40am PDT

Grand Ballroom I

GraphQL simplifies client development through flexible, expressive data queries. However, in serverless production environments, that flexibility can quietly increase latency and infrastructure cost.

In AWS-based architectures using Lambda, DynamoDB, Aurora Serverless, and distributed services, resolver design and query structure directly impact execution time, cold starts, and overall spend. Unlike REST, GraphQL shifts cost dynamics to query complexity and resolver fan-out, and often in ways teams don’t anticipate until production traffic scales.

This session examines common performance and cost anti-patterns in serverless GraphQL systems, including N+1 resolver cascades, unbounded query depth, over-fetching, and inefficient resolver fan-out. We’ll explore how these patterns affect Lambda duration, concurrency, and downstream data stores.

Attendees will learn practical mitigation strategies such as batching with DataLoader, caching and persisted queries, query complexity limits, schema guardrails, and observability techniques to detect bottlenecks early.

Speakers

Harpreet Siddhu

Lead Software Engineer, AWS Community Builder

Harpreet Siddhu is a Lead Software Engineer and AWS Certified Solution Architect, Developer, and CloudOps engineer, AWS community Builder, and AWS road to re:Invent hackathon Champion and with over a decade of experience designing and modernizing cloud-native systems. He specializes... Read More →

Shravanth Venkatesh

AWS Solutions Architect, Independent Researcher

Shravanth is a AWS Certified Solutions Architect and Principal Software Engineer with 8+ years designing and scaling production systems on AWS. Leading teams shipping serverless healthcare platforms across AWS, he saw firsthand how GraphQL's flexibility quietly reshapes cost and performance... Read More →

graphql conf pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:15am - 10:40am PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Performance

Audience Level Beginner
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:15am PDT

Screens on Shuffle: How Netflix Scales Server‑Driven, Ever‑Changing Pages - Sreekanth Ramakrishnan, Netflix

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:15am - 10:40am PDT

Boardroom

How do you power a product where every page layout, module, and slice of content can change daily—across hundreds of millions of devices—without shipping a new client every time? In this talk, we’ll dive into how Netflix evolved its GraphQL APIs from traditional “data fetching” into a server‑driven UI platform, enabling rapid product innovation and page updates without requiring app releases across a massive device ecosystem. We’ll walk through the architecture that lets servers describe dynamic page structure and behavior, how those contracts scale across many product surfaces and experiments, and the performance and reliability lessons we learned operating this at Netflix scale. When we built this system, we found almost no public examples of similar patterns, so this session is intentionally practical: we’ll share concrete schema patterns, client rendering strategies, and tips you can apply to your own feeds, homepages, and highly dynamic experiences—whether you’re working at Netflix scale or just starting to stretch GraphQL beyond CRUD.

Speakers

Sreekanth Ramakrishnan

Senior Software Engineer, Netflix

Sreekanth Ramakrishnan is a Senior Software Engineer on the Member API team at Netflix, where he works on systems that power dynamic, real-time experiences in Netflix pages across devices worldwide. He focuses on GraphQL, distributed systems, and server-driven UI architecture. Prior... Read More →

Screens on Shuffle pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:15am - 10:40am PDT
Boardroom

Schema Design + Evolution + Governance

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:30am PDT

Lightning Talk: The @deprecated Journey: Five Stops From Schema Hint To Gateway Power - Nasser Abouelazm, Bloomberg

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:30am - 10:40am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

@deprecated is usually treated as a client-facing hint. However, in federated GraphQL, it can evolve into a set of patterns that shape governance, runtime behavior, observability, and even gateway planning. In this lightning talk, I’ll take @deprecated on a five-stop journey across the federation lifecycle — 1) schema hint, 2) schema shaping, 3) runtime feedback, 4) client-aware telemetry, and 5) gateway power. I’ll close with a brief developer experience bonus — how structured deprecation metadata can feed code-gen/IDE tooling to suggest non-deprecated alternatives while queries are being written. The goal of the talk is to share a practical mental model and guardrails for keeping large federated graphs evolvable, observable, and safe.

Speakers

Nasser Abouelazm

Senior Software Engineer, Bloomberg

A middle school teacher turned web developer, Nasser Abouelazm has always embraced the art of building epic and engaging experiences that delight, educate, and enchant a broad audience of users. As a senior full-stack engineer working to support Bloomberg Media, he is focused on developing... Read More →

Nasser the deprecated journey GraphQLConf26 pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:30am - 10:40am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Schema Design + Evolution + Governance

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:50am PDT

GraphQL Meets LLMs & Agents: Building Production AI at Starbucks Scale - Sharon Gorla, Starbucks

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am PDT

Boardroom

GraphQL isn't just an API technology—it's the perfect foundation for AI agents and LLM-powered applications. At Starbucks, we built GraphQL platforms at massive scale (180M+ queries/day, 10,000 stores, 31M+ app users) before GenAI became mainstream. Now, as we explore AI integration, we're discovering that GraphQL provides fundamental advantages for AI that are impossible with REST.

This talk explores the AI systems we're building on our existing GraphQL infrastructure:

In-store AI assistant (planned for Order Engine GraphQL BFF)
Mobile/web AI platform (exploring on Apollo Supergraph)
On-call automation using Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers
You'll learn how GraphQL reduces AI token costs by 75x, enables zero-configuration AI tool discovery, provides built-in guardrails through type systems, and why federation is the perfect architecture for enterprise AI agents. Real demos, proven patterns, lessons from building GraphQL at scale.

Speakers

Sharon Gorla

Engineer Lead, Starbucks

I’m an engineering leader with 16+ years of experience driving digital transformation, modernizing systems, and building high-performing teams. At Starbucks, I'm lead engineer for Next‑Gen POS modernization, earned a U.S. patent, and founded the GraphQL Community of Practice... Read More →

GraphQL Meets LLMs Final pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am PDT
Boardroom

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:50am PDT

Modern Apollo Client React - Brennen Davis, Lease End

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am PDT

Grand Ballroom I

Use Apollo Client v4 in React with Tanstack Router.

We’ll be using GraphQL code generation from your schema, preloading data at the router level, optmistic updates, and using Apollo’s cache to eliminate unnecessary refetching and rerenders. You’ll see how smart cache usage and colocating queries lets components read data directly where they need it which will reduce prop drilling. The goal is to show how “modern” Apollo Client patterns fit naturally into today’s React architecture to create apps that feel both simpler to reason about and noticeably more performant.

Speakers

Brennen Davis

Principal Software Engineer, Lease End

Husband to a beautiful wife and a dad to 2 boys. Video games and programming

apollo client v4 brennen davis pptx

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Clients

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

11:25am PDT

Coordinated Access Control with @policy - Huang Minghe, Booking.com

Wednesday May 20, 2026 11:25am - 11:50am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

At a company like Booking.com, every sensitive field in the GraphQL schema has more than one team with a legitimate claim on it — Security, Identity, Legal, Privacy, Data Governance, the Traffic Gateway, the Federation Platform, and the hundreds of domain teams that own the data itself. When that many stakeholders need to agree on what "authorized" means for a single field, you don't have a security problem; you have a coordination problem. And solving it as security only makes it worse.This talk shares how we turned that coordination problem into a contract using a single federation directive — @policy. Domain teams author rules for the data they own. Privacy and Identity contribute cross-cutting concerns. Other domains compose by reference instead of re-authoring. The router is the only place enforcement happens. One audit trail. No cross-team meetings.

What you'll learn:

Why multi-stakeholder access control is a coordination problem, not a security one

How @policy becomes the coordination contract between domain teams, cross-cutting authorities, and the federation platform

The single-enforcement-point + bounded-authorship + free-reuse architecture — and how it lets new teams adopt without coordination overhead

Speakers

Huang Minghe

Senior Software Engineer, Booking.com

Minghe is a Senior Engineer at Booking.com with over 15 years of industry experience spanning DevOps, web, and mobile development. Recently, he has been maintaining the GraphQL federation platform at Booking.com, focusing on efficiently managing large scale schemas and federating... Read More →

Coordinated Access Control with @policy — Minghe Huang · Field Notes pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 11:25am - 11:50am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Security

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

12:00pm PDT

Stop Reviewing Schemas: How Intuit Made Developers Faster by Automating Governance - Oleks Bidiuk, Intuit

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

Abstract: Schema governance shouldn’t grind development to a halt or burn out graph stewardship teams. As Intuit’s Supergraph ecosystem grew, our reliance on manual schema reviews created bottlenecks that slowed onboarding and frustrated developers. We knew we needed a better approach — so we built a hybrid governance model that puts Schema Co-Pilot directly into the developer workflow and transformed our "API Jedis" from gatekeepers into enablers.

In this talk, you’ll learn how we built real-time IDE linting, AI-powered schema analysis, and semantic “collision” detection to surface issues before code is even committed. With these tools in place, onboarding timelines shrank from weeks to days, and contributors now ship to the graph with speed and confidence.

Who should attend: Platform engineers, API architects, and engineering leaders responsible for GraphQL governance and developer experience.

Key takeaway: Governance isn’t about gatekeeping — it’s about building smart tools that help your teams move faster with confidence.

Speakers

Oleks Bidiuk

Senior Software Engineer, Intuit

Senior Software Engineer at Intuit with 10+ years of evolution from JavaScript roots to complex systems. Outside the IDE, I bridge the gap between digital and tactile as a craftsman. I’m currently restoring the last "analog" Porsche 911—a hands-on project spanning everything from... Read More →

GraphQLConf 2026 Intuit Stop Reviewing Schemas (Oleks Bidiuk) pptx

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Schema Design + Evolution + Governance

Audience Level Advanced
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

12:00pm PDT

The Biggest Change To GraphQL Codegen in 10 Years - Eddy Nguyen, The Guild & SEEK & Igor Kusakov, Yelp

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm PDT

Boardroom

GraphQL Codegen has been the go-to tool for generating types for GraphQL clients for over a decade. But as use cases grew, so did the friction: excessive generated code, complex setups, and growing confusion among users on how to use the output.

In this talk, we'll explore a new client-focused Codegen setup that rethinks those trade-offs. You'll see how we drastically reduce generated output, ensure correct and predictable types, and provide a smooth migration path from existing tools without sacrificing flexibility or safety.

We'll also dive into the story behind the change: a collaboration between Eddy (The Guild) and Igor (Yelp), sparked by a single question and shaped by open discussion across time zones. It’s a look at how community feedback, real-world constraints, and trust can drive the biggest evolution in Codegen’s history.

Speakers

Eddy Nguyen

Software Developer, The Guild

Eddy is a Lead Engineer at SEEK, where he builds GraphQL-driven applications by day. By night, he moonlights at The Guild as a GraphQL Code Generator maintainer—with the unrelenting support of his two cats.

Igor Kusakov

Senior Developer, Yelp

Seasoned full-stack sorcerer with 20+ years crafting scalable web empires, from Montreal's tech trenches to global gigs at spots like Yelp and beyond.

biggest change codegen graphqlconf 2026 pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm PDT
Boardroom

Tooling + DX + Testing + Documentation

Audience Level Beginner
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

1:55pm PDT

Observability for a Multi-Tenant GraphQL Gateway at Scale - Vickey Yeh, Airbnb

Wednesday May 20, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

Viaduct, Airbnb's unified data access layer, hosts over 1.5M lines of application code from 500+ tenants, with 200+ changes merged daily—all operating as a single service. At this scale, enabling teams to independently monitor and troubleshoot their code is essential.
This talk describes how we approach observability with multitenancy at the core:
- Establishing clear ownership of modules and attributing metrics, spans, and errors to those owners
- Providing alerts and dashboards at multiple levels: system, operation, tenant, and field
- Enabling schema-driven alerting, where tenants declaratively specify monitoring requirements directly in the schema and the platform implements them automatically
- Using execution traces to visualize query execution and core-tenant interactions, tackling challenges like:
- Representing batched dataloader calls (where N field requests become 1 RPC)
- Instrumenting downstream service clients across all data-fetching code
- Managing observability costs via selective sampling and cardinality-aware metrics

Our goal: empower tenants to manage their portion of Viaduct as a standalone service—without bottlenecking on the platform team.

Speakers

Vickey Yeh

Senior Software Engineer, Airbnb

I work on Viaduct, Airbnb's GraphQL-based data-oriented service mesh.

observability multi tenant graphql at scale pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Observability + Telemetry + Tracing

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

2:30pm PDT

Sharding a GraphQL Gateway for Blast Radius Reduction - Linquan Zhang & Cetin Sahin, Airbnb

Wednesday May 20, 2026 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT

Boardroom

At Airbnb, our GraphQL gateway is a multi-tenant serverless platform hosting 500+ tenants and 1.5M+ lines of application code. Like many large GraphQL systems, it operated as a "shared fate" architecture. To mitigate this risk, we embarked on a multi-year journey to implement traffic sharding at different levels of sophistication. We started with shuffle sharding to reduce the blast radius of any single bad operation. We then added targeted sharding to separate online from asynchronous traffic, to rapidly quarantine misbehaving operations, and to improve the signal-to-noise ratio for our automated canary analysis. Most recently, to mitigate the risk posed by tenants that are used by lots of operations (and thus could bring down lots of shards), we have been working on tenant-aware sharding that minimizes the blast radius of such tenants.

We will cover how we architected our sharding solution and how it improved our operational abilities. You will gain a clear understanding of how our implementation tradeoffs have fared over time, key production insights gathered since rollout, and strategies to evolve a GraphQL gateway towards greater isolation without fragmenting the API surface.

Speakers

Linquan Zhang

Individual Contributor, Airbnb

I work on Viaduct, Airbnb's GraphQL-based system that provides a unified interface for accessing and interacting with any data source at Airbnb.

Cetin Sahin

Staff Software Engineer, Airbnb

Cetin works on Viaduct, Airbnb’s multi-tenant GraphQL platform that provides a unified interface for accessing and interacting with any data source at Airbnb. His work centers on reliability, performance, and observability at scale.

Sharding a GraphQL Gateway for Blast Radius Reduction pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
Boardroom

Servers

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

2:30pm PDT

The Easy Way and the Hard Way: Blue-green GraphQL Deployments - Zack Warnimont, Apollo

Wednesday May 20, 2026 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Blue-green and canary deploys are table stakes for application code, but they’re surprisingly hard to get right for GraphQL. Routers often just “pull latest” schema, rollbacks mean republishing and recomposing, and it’s nearly impossible to answer a basic incident question: “What schema was this request actually hitting?”. After testing in a staging environment and deploying to production, we often find edge cases that broke the assumptions we made in the testing phase.

This talk is an engineering case study. I’ll walk through the design journey that led us to a blue-green deployment model for GraphQL built on immutable schema artifacts and explicit rollbacks. We’ll unpack the constraints (federation, many subgraphs, multiple environments), the dead-ends we hit, and the principles that finally worked.

You’ll leave with a mental model and concrete patterns you can apply to your own GraphQL infrastructure, irrespective of tooling: how to structure blue-green router fleets, how to pin to exact schema versions, how to do instant rollbacks safely, and what to log so you can always reconstruct “what was live where” when production gets weird.

Speakers

Zack Warnimont

Software Engineer, Apollo

Zack is a Software Engineer currently working at Apollo. He has worked for companies small and large over the last 10 years, with an emphasis on deployment safety and development efficiency.

In his free time, Zack enjoys playing piano and spending time with his family. Ask him anything about music... Read More →

graphqlconf 2026 05 zack warnimont no paging pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Tooling + DX + Testing + Documentation

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

3:05pm PDT

GraphQL Data Mocking at Scale With LLMs and @generateMock - Michael Rebello, Airbnb

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm PDT

Boardroom

Producing valid and realistic mock data for prototyping and testing has been an unsolved challenge for years. Mock data is tedious to write and maintain, but attempts to improve the process such as random value generation and field stubbing fall short as they lack essential domain context to make test data realistic and meaningful.
In this talk, I’ll share how we’ve reimagined GraphQL mocking at Airbnb by combining existing GraphQL infrastructure, rich product and schema context, and LLMs to generate convincing, type-safe mock data simply by adding a directive (@generateMock) to a field or operation:
- How integrating LLMs that are highly contextualized by a schema, documentation, and UX design into existing GraphQL tools drives a leap forward in the speed and quality of mock data creation.
- How a directive-driven approach lets engineers generate production-like, schema-conformant mock data without writing code.
- How integrating generated mock data into the GraphQL client runtime can enable engineers to build and test clients before server implementation.
- How this strategy guarantees that generated mock data is correct, deterministic, and stays in-sync with the server schema.

Speakers

Michael Rebello

Staff Engineer, Airbnb

Michael is a Staff Engineer at Airbnb focusing on GraphQL clients, with >10 years of tech experience. Previously, he spent 6 years at Lyft as Staff Engineer leading mobile networking, building the rider app, and contributing to their engineering blog. He's spoken at conferences globally... Read More →

GraphQL Data Mocking at Scale with LLMs and generateMock pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm PDT
Boardroom

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

3:05pm PDT

Building MCP Apps With GraphQL Patterns You Already Know - Jerel Miller, Apollo GraphQL

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

You know how to build client apps—but where do client developers fit in the new world of ChatGPT and MCP? If you've used GraphQL before, it turns out your knowledge translates directly. This talk demonstrates how to build MCP apps using Apollo's AI apps client and MCP server with patterns you already use:
1. Fragment colocation → Tool design: Structure MCP tools like component data requirements
2. Query optimization → Tool call patterns: Minimize LLM roundtrips with the same performance thinking
3. Type safety → Tool schemas: Apply GraphQL's type discipline to MCP definitions
A live demo builds an MCP app querying a GraphQL API, showing how best practices from GraphQL client development apply to OpenAI and MCP apps.

Speakers

Jerel Miller

Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Apollo GraphQL

Jerel is a Colorado native with a brief stint in Portland Oregon. He loves to code and learn about all sorts of programming patterns. He is an avid Denver Broncos fan and loves to play the bass.

GraphQL Conf 2026 Jerel pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Clients

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

3:50pm PDT

Brute Force Correctness - James Bellenger, Airbnb

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:50pm - 4:15pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

So you’re a maintainer of a GraphQL system. Whether it’s a federation gateway, a complex client library, or a custom executor—how do you know that it’s capital-C Correct?

Your tests are decent, and they seem to pass, but what about the test cases that you didn’t think of? Did you remember to handle @skip directives on fragment spreads? What about when those directives use variables? Or when you spread an abstract type in an abstract scope?

Would you trust your system to serve million-dollar transactions?

This session will cover how probabilistic testing can be applied to complex GraphQL systems to find bugs in places we wouldn’t have thought to look. We’ll discuss how Airbnb leveraged this approach to launch a novel GraphQL engine with 0 spec conformance bugs, and how you can apply these same techniques to build unshakable confidence in your own systems.

Speakers

James Bellenger

Engineer, Airbnb

Running and baking enthusiast.

Brute Force Correctness selected stills pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:50pm - 4:15pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Tooling + DX + Testing + Documentation

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

3:50pm PDT

Speed Without Sacrifice: How Wayfair Transforms DevEx With AI and MCP - Maheswari Karlapudi & Muskan Sethi, Wayfair

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:50pm - 4:15pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

Wayfair is embedding AI and MCP into every stage of the developer workflow to unlock speed without compromising quality. From Schema Copilot (inline reviews) to AI Mocking (intelligent test data generation) to AI-Assisted Schema Documentation (auditing and auto-generating descriptions across 200+ subgraphs), these purpose-built tools streamline workflows, reduce friction, and scale engineering excellence—helping teams ship faster with greater confidence and consistency. Join to learn how AI and MCP cut busywork so Wayfair’s devs can ship faster with confidence.

Speakers

Maheswari Karlapudi

Software Engineer, Wayfair

Maheswari is a Software Engineer on the GraphQL Platforms team at Wayfair, providing a stable and resilient gateway for e-commerce data. Her work focuses on platform reliability and performance, while crafting the tooling necessary to accelerate the developer lifecycle across Way... Read More →

Muskan Kaur Sethi

Software Engineer, Wayfair

Muskan is a Software Engineer on Wayfair’s GraphQL Platforms team, where she develops reliable and scalable infrastructure to support e-commerce data access. Her work centers on improving platform performance and stability, as well as building developer tools that streamline workflows... Read More →

Accelerating the GraphQL Lifecycle pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:50pm - 4:15pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Tooling + DX + Testing + Documentation

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

4:25pm PDT

Lightning Talk: DoS Wars: Revenge of the Fragments - Sachin Shinde, Apollo GraphQL

Wednesday May 20, 2026 4:25pm - 4:35pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Fragments—an indispensable tool for modularizing data requirements alongside client code, but also a denial-of-service attack vector for servers. Security guides will tell you to mitigate by validating queries and performing cost analysis, usually via field costs and list sizes. However, this focus on field execution can distract from how fragments affect the rest of the server stack. In this lightning talk, we explore the attack patterns and mitigation strategies for the fragment-based vulnerabilities at the core of CVE-2025-31496, CVE-2025-32030, CVE-2025-32033, and CVE-2025-32034.

Speakers

Sachin Shinde

Staff Software Engineer, Apollo GraphQL

Working on all things federation and orchestration at Apollo, previously worked on the Apollo Studio schema and metrics pipelines.

DoS Wars Revenge of the Fragments pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 4:25pm - 4:35pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Security

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

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